


Crossing the River to the Promised Land

by Tammany



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: F/M, Love, Mad Science, Mad gambles, Timey-Wimey
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-23
Updated: 2015-12-23
Packaged: 2018-05-08 14:17:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,324
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5500433
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tammany/pseuds/Tammany
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This is what is called "gambling" by those who understand what a risk a fanwriter takes in writing a story inspired by the potential implied by an episode that has not yet aired.</p><p>I love River Song--and knowing she's coming back, even if it's still framed within the boundaries of her life as canon lays it out, has me as usual thinking about the illogic of those boundaries, when your One True Love is timey-wimey.</p><p>So--this is about love, and hope, and a Doctor who can spend three thousand years hammering on super-diamond to save someone he loves. And it's a conviction on my part that he loves River, and only delays in saving her because he thinks he's already lost that game.</p><p>Until he stops thinking that way. (smile) I hope you guys like it. </p><p>The transcripts, BTW, were accessed at http://www.chakoteya.net/, and my sincere thanks to whomsoever made them available.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Crossing the River to the Promised Land

Crossing the River to the Promised Land

 

_DOCTOR: Why? Why would I give her my screwdriver? Why would I do that? Thing is, future me had years to think about it, all those years to think of a way to save her, and what he did was give her a screwdriver. Why would I do that?_  
_(Because it also contains a neural relay, which has two green lights on it.)_  
_DOCTOR: Oh! Oh! Oh, look at that. I'm very good!_  
_DONNA: What have you done?_  
_DOCTOR: Saved her._

_Doctor Who, The Forest of the Dead_

 

The tenth Doctor sat in a little room his companions seldom found, and contemplated his accomplishment—his little bootstrap victory. The new sonic screwdriver sat on the workbench in front of him, a thing of beauty. He’d kept it, after the download, knowing that in some eerie way he’d trod over the original loop in which it would have first appeared. But he’d won, he thought. He’d won the day and he damned well intended that it stay won. So for fear of forgetting, he’d fixed the device now, while the memories were still fresh and crisp and the need filled his belly and his loins and set two hearts pounding in syncopated jazz beats.

River. Dr. River Song. An archaeologist, of all damnable things. The woman who knew his name. Who would know his name. The woman he’d trust implicitly, and who’d trust him likewise…a mad tumble of bronze hair, eyes a strange, luminous blue-grey-green like labradorite. A woman who’d been determined to die for him rather than risk one day of her memories of him erased.

“She could have just been crazy, of course” he said to himself. “I mean, people are crazy. It could be all in her own head.”

But something told him it wasn’t.

He’d refused to read her diary. What was it she’d said? “Spoilers.”

He slipped the chip into the shaft, and grinned. He’d had time—he’d had years. He’d thought it through, turning it over and over. He’d save her.

When he was sure he was done, he stood and slipped the screwdriver into a cubbyhole up over his workbench. Then he found a bit of card, and wrote her name in really big letters: River Song: Her Screwdriver.

There, he thought. That ought to do it.

Someday he’d regenerate, he knew, and in that regeneration he’d meet her. Know her. Love her. Tell her his name. Give her that screwdriver.

But it was in this life she’d saved him—and he wasn’t about to fail to return the favor.

“You’re mine, River Song,” he growled. “Yeah, right, some other me is going to be the lucky sod who actually marries you—but I’m the one who loved you first, and that’s got to count for something.”

And then he walked away, because the one thing he’d learned after all the centuries was that you can only live the regeneration you’re in. Time happens in its own way. He’d let the story play out as it would. But this was how his tenth regeneration would love her.

oOo

 

The eleventh Doctor stood in the workshop, glowering at the cubbyhole. It had been left untouched for millennia. But it had never left. It had come to feel like an axe hovering over his head. The future he didn’t want to know was coming…

Well, it had come. Today was the end.

He’d gone to London and had his hair cut. He’d found his very best tuxedo, in wardrobe. He was taking her to the Singing Towers of Darillium. It was going to be a glorious night. He had it on good authority.

He would cry. He had that on good authority, too. Not that he needed to be told. She’d come into his life like random chaos, a brilliant signature scrawled across space and time. Just by existing she’d changed the nature of his relationship with Amy and Rory—forced him to accept them as relatives as well as proteges. His in-laws. Forced him to open doors in his heart he hadn’t opened in forever. Or ever at all.

He smiled a bent, broken smile, and gnawed one knuckle as he thought about it. The screwdriver waited…but time had made its demand.

He might still see her, he thought. Her life and his were such kitten-tangles in time that he could give her the screwdriver now, and see her again in two weeks, earlier in her life, later in his…and she’d still be River, with her bright nova smile and her body like a little tiger and her eternal “spoilers, sweetie.”

Only now he’d have a spoiler, too….and it would haunt him. He ached at the thought of meeting a younger her, knowing he’d already sent her to her doom.

And yet, it had to be done. If he didn’t do this now, she’d die forever and entirely. He was a clever boy, he was, the old him as well as the new him, and he knew what he had to do.

He took the screwdriver from the cubby, and spent an hour wrapping it rather badly.

He gave it to her that night.

As predicted, he cried.

oOo

It hurt and it hurt and it kept on hurting, and even the mystery of the Impossible Girl couldn’t keep her ghost from tearing at his soul. Sometimes—just sometimes—he wanted to go back to the library, link with the computer, talk to the echo of River.

Sometimes the loss was too much. Amy gone. Rory gone. River gone.

The Impossible Girl made up for it—almost. He could laugh. He could play. She played a game, and he played the part she wanted, and if he was very good, they could both believe in a place that was safe and a fantasy that was secure and a relationship without loss. His Impossible Girl, who broke the rules that had destroyed Amy, and Rory, and Donna, and Rose, and Sarah Jane, and…

And River Song.

And now he was going to his own grave, where he fully expected to die, on Trenzalore.

At least, he thought, Clara would be with him.

His Impossible Girl. The one who lived. And lived. And lived.

She was talking to River, now…His Impossible Girl and the wife who’d died before he even knew what he was losing…

oOo

_(The Doctor lights a handy firebrand or torch.)_  
_CLARA: Where are we?_  
_DOCTOR: Catacombs._  
_CLARA: I hate catacombs. So how come I met your dead wife?_  
_DOCTOR: Oh well, you know how it is when you lose someone close to you. I sort of made a back-up._  
_RIVER: I died saving him. In return, he saved me to a database in the biggest library in the universe. Left me like a book on a shelf. Didn't even say goodbye. He doesn't like endings._  
_DOCTOR: Clara, come on! Run, run!_

Doctor Who, The Name of the Doctor

oOo

He had kissed her. The twelfth Doctor could remember that. He couldn’t remember the Impossible Girl. He’d read his own diaries and found that as much as they moved him, she was a story—nothing more. But he could remember River Song. He could remember her voice when she should have had no voice, and her passion, when she should have had no passion left that wasn’t contained in the tidy fantasy of the Library, and he could remember kissing her when there should have been no lips to kiss, no body to hold tight, no wild frizz of hair to tickle the side of his face. Nothing but an echo that should have faded….but which had not.

And now he’d seen her again, and the love ran wild along with the fear and the frustration and the laughter. The Impossible Girl, he thought, had always been impossible—a fantasy beloved as much for her undying, eternal story quality as for herself. River, though, ended—as did all things. But that was why he wanted her back.

Maybe not today. But someday—and for the rest of their lives.

The wisdom of his former selves muttered in his ears. “You can’t change time. You can’t change your own time line. You can’t change history.”

He narrowed his eyes, glowering under those wild Scottish eyebrows. “Sod off,” he told his former selves. “I’m not changing history—just adding a layer I never knew was there before.” The real kicker hasn’t even happened yet. None of the important bits have happened yet.

He didn’t know what were the important bits, either…not having seen her again, been dragged from pillar to post in her madcap scramble to prove she was crazier than any woman he’d ever known before or since. Did he want to live every day of their lives together? No. They’d kill each other…

He loved her because she could live free. Because she could be River, and every time he crossed her it was new and old. You can only cross the same River once…

He sat at the workbench and tinkered with the little storage card. Between bits of work, he twiddled around with his guitar, brooding and looking for her melodies in the strings…

He’d stolen a reading of her during that mad rush with her other husbands… stolen the same information the teleport device on the Library used to beam people to safety—or to the memory, where they would be saved. The memory of a body.

He’d even fixed a few things. It galled him that she’d lost her Time Lady legacy saving his life. And it thrilled and delighted him to think she could join him, and that he could know her in body after body through the years to come.

So—a substrate of her physical body. Then another layer to capture that vivid, laughing, quarrelsome wife of his—her dreams and fears, her memories. Now all he had to do was put it where it belonged.

oOo

He could hear her somewhere with her team, arguing—of course arguing. That high and mighty tone she took with the man who’d hired her. The mere held-in fragment of patience she had for Miss Evangelista. The excitement, to be going somewhere new, doing something new, exploring…

That was his girl, he thought with a wry grin. Good on her—give ‘em hell, River.

My River.

He could hear the hum of the ship’s engines as they pulled ever closer to the Library…closer and closer to River’s death.

He waited, barely breathing, ducking into the shadows that hid his Tardis as she strode down the corridor and into her quarters.

Now he knew which room was hers. He waited, and the sound he hoped for began—the heavy rush of water from the shower.

He darted in, her door’s programming taking no more than a second with his sonic to see him through. He scanned her room, looking at the familiar, alien tumble of clothing and tools she left strewn behind her.

There it was—her sonic. On the dresser. He snatched it up. He’d held it mere weeks before—as eleven. It had been millennia since he’d held it, as twelve. He studied it, feeling the familiar conflict—was it old, or new? Familiar or half-forgotten?

It didn’t matter, did it? He popped the old chip out—the chip he’d been so proud to design as ten. He popped the new chip in. Then, fast, before something could go wrong, he was out again, and to his Tardis, and gone in a whoop-whoop-whoop, and history was mended, and could heal itself. It would run as it had run. Eleven would give her the screwdriver, just as he had. Ten would solve the riddle, design the first chip, thinking he knew how it all came out.

And he, twelve, would wait at this end of time, knowing there was more to come…that someday someone—him, or someone else—would realize that the River in the Library’s memory was no faint echo, saved from death but never to be whole. No—it was all of her, just as it had been all of Donna and all of the thousands that Charlotte had saved. Someday she would be brought back…to stride a corridor again, to laugh like a wild witch on the winds of the coming storm again, to dance lightening through his universe again…

River. His River…

oOo

_RIVER [OC]: Everybody knows that everybody dies. But not every day._  
_(The Doctor plugs the screwdriver into the core, and her neural energy is transferred.)_  
_RIVER [OC]: Not today._  
_(Charlotte Node smiles.)_

_**[Hospital grounds]** _

_(River is wearing a loose white robe. Charlotte and Doctor Moon walk up to her.)_  
_GIRL: It's okay, you're safe. You'll always be safe here. The Doctor fixed the data core. This is a good place now. But I was worried you might be lonely, so I brought you some friends. Aren't I a clever girl?_  
_EVANGELISTA: Aren't we all?_  
_(Anita, the two Daves and Miss Evangelista with her normal face are walking towards her.)_  
_RIVER: Oh, for heaven's sake. He just can't do it, can he? That man. That impossible man. He just can't give in._  
_RIVER [OC]: Some days are special. Some days are so, so blessed. Some days, nobody dies at all._  
_(The Doctor returns to the Reception and stares at the Tardis. He snaps his fingers, and the door opens. Donna is waiting inside.)_  
_RIVER [OC]: Now and then, every once in a very long while, every day in a million days, when the wind stands fair, and the Doctor comes to call_  
_(He snaps his fingers again and the door closes.)_

_**[Children's bedroom]** _

_(River closes her diary.)_  
_RIVER: Everybody lives._  
_(She kisses Charlotte goodnight and looks at Ella and Joshua.)_  
_RIVER: Sweet dreams, everyone._

_Doctor Who, The Forest of the Dead_


End file.
